


A Fiery Spit of Hope

by stellardarlings



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:48:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26938405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellardarlings/pseuds/stellardarlings
Summary: Kylo Ren has been to many shitholes in his time as Snoke’s enforcer and bogeyman, but Jakku beats them all. It’s hot and grimy, sand encrusting everything and getting everywhere. Even his eyeballs feel dusty. His armor serves the effect of slowly roasting him in the heat, and he can’t slake his thirst until he’s back in the confines of the Silencer.Or:Kylo's time in Jakku from the beginning of A Path to Broken Stars.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 13
Kudos: 32





	A Fiery Spit of Hope

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KyloWithAZukoArc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KyloWithAZukoArc/gifts).



> A little while ago I asked for prompts on Tumblr as I was approaching a milestone of 50 followers. I got two prompts, and this was the first. @kylowithazukoarc asked to see the scene from A Path to Broken Stars where Kylo first finds Rey and has in her in a Force/magic hold. So here it is!

Kylo Ren has been to many shitholes in his time as Snoke’s enforcer and bogeyman, but Jakku beats them all. It’s hot and grimy, sand encrusting everything and getting everywhere. Even his eyeballs feel dusty. His armor serves the effect of slowly roasting him in the heat, and he can’t slake his thirst until he’s back in the confines of the Silencer. Nor does he like pushing Grimtaash too hard in this environment, and the lack of any paved roads means the horse’s footing is less sure than it would be in a proper town.

Days like this feel like a joke at the universe’s expense. Not just because of…everything that has brought him here, but because his grandfather apparently came from a desert land, so he ought to have some inherited resistance to these conditions. And yet. This place on the fringes of the kingdom is somehow worse than the humid, festering swamps of Lothal.

Niima is little more than a labyrinth of narrow, unpaved lanes that sprawl out from the market square. The shacks are cobbled together from whatever happened to be available and probably cannibalize each other, stripped for parts when the inhabitants depart or when the elements finally prove too much for their structures to weather.

He feels a twinge of guilt about the state of the place, but that’s nothing new. He thinks he came here as a very small boy—maybe not Niima, but Jakku, where he’d hidden behind his mother’s skirts at the sight of the crowds who came to greet her. Then it had been ripe farmland that turned into open plains. Now it has withered away, all life siphoned out of the soil, and the crowds have dwindled to only the hardiest of his mother’s subjects. Kylo does what he always does when confronted with the truth of the world: he finds a source for his anger.

“Where did you get this information?” he demands of the scrawny man cowering in front of him. He’s just been handed a fistful of leaflets that are apparently the reason he’s been summoned all the way out to the edge of the kingdom.

“From h—her house, sir.” The man blinks at him, glassy-eyed. He’s not seen a good meal in years, even if he is the lacky of the man who runs Niima in lieu of any real Imperial oversight. Flutt? Putt? An annoying slug of a being, whatever his name. “We’ve been watching it and went in to get the evidence this morning.”

Kylo sees himself reflected in the man’s wide eyes—a black-draped specter, an overlarge vulture come to pick clean the bones of this ruined town. “And how did you know it was in there?”

The pitiful wretch shrugs. “Plutt just knew.” He mumbles the next part. “Unkar Plutt knows everything that happens in Niima.”

Kylo is sure he does. Which is why Kylo isn’t convinced that this ‘Plutt’ only just uncovered evidence of a Resistance member living in his town. “And he knew where to find these within the house?”

Another blink, and a nervous nod. The man doesn’t understand the significance of the question, or the trouble he’s just landed this esteemed Plutt in.

“You may leave.” 

There’s a moment of fervent, terrified blinking, and the man scarpers, disappearing among the huts like he’s got wolves snapping at his heels.

Kylo is still idly flicking through the evidence he’s been given when Trudgen sidles up alongside Kylo on his own mount. 

“Anything interesting?” he asks, and Kylo’s mood sours further at the curl of bloodlust emanating from the other man.

He takes his time before responding. He doesn’t actually care if the paperwork contains any fresh leads about the Resistance’s movements. They’re irrelevant. They haven’t made a significant effort against Snoke in years, so what is the use of them, except to bolster a spark of hope amongst the population? They’re not a threat and he has no great ambition to hunt them down and wipe them out.

The documents retrieved from Kanata’s house are what he expected. Enough to justify a judgment of treason: forged papers, fake travel permits, the usual nonsense. There’s nothing to definitively tie her to the movement—she’s not foolish enough to commit that to writing. Still, he keeps looking, even if he’s not sure what he’s hoping to find.

“Well?” Trudgen presses.

“Patience.”

Trudgen huffs through his mask. “Someone’s in a good mood this morning.”

He’s right, not that Kylo will admit that. Something has been nagging at him all morning, an itch in his consciousness that got worse the closer he got to Niima. It feels like he’s a buzzing gnat trapped inside the mask, except it’s rattling around inside his skull where he can’t get to it. It sets his mood on edge, which can’t bode well for the residents of this fleapit masquerading as a town.

The only thing that comes close to giving him a measure of satisfaction is the name on one of the permits. Unkar Plutt.

So. That’s what this is about. The man has probably been letting Kanata do what she wanted for years in exchange for a forgery of his own here and there. Now there’s a dispute between them and he’s decided to dispose of her instead. In doing so, the fool has signed his own death warrant.

“We have enough,” he finally announces to the waiting Guard. “At least for treason.”

“Not Resistance?” Vicrul asks, disappointed.

“Not that I can see. But she’s a prolific forger, and that’s almost the same thing.” For who else would be so eager to thwart the Imperial law as much as those who want to overthrow his reign?

_People who are starving and suffering and looking for a way out,_ a small voice in the back of Kylo’s mind whispers. It’s rare that it speaks up, but when it does, it sounds an awful lot like his mother. 

He ignores the voice, as he always does. “Regardless, we’ll tell the crowd that she is anyway. It’ll be a good deterrent.”

There’s a hum of excitement from the rest of the Guard. They enjoy this aspect of the work; which isn’t surprising, considering they signed up to do it. 

“Usual routine, Ren?” Ushar asks.

He waves his hand. “Go ahead. Round her up. I’ll follow.”

The Guard nod in his direction at their orders and trot away on their mounts in the direction of the market square. They always arrive ahead of him for a public spectacle like this. People panic when they see him; it’s better to wait until the crowd is already under control before he arrives.

Alone once more, he lingers in the dusty lanes, trying to find some shade among the ramshackle buildings. The place is eerily quiet, but he tends to have that effect on populations. The sound of horses will have driven the wiser inhabitants of Niima out of their hovels and either out into the desert, or towards the market for the hope of safety in numbers. Nobody will linger at the merest hint of black-clad Imperial Guards.

He can feel when the other men reach the square: the collective unease, the surge of panic, the push of Trudgen’s magic as he freezes them all in place. It’s like somebody has caught all of that panic in a bucket, but it is overfull, sloshing out in cold ripples of fear. He turns his back on the sensation.

Kylo steers Grimtaash around a corner, ready to slowly walk the stallion down another crooked, filthy street, when the niggling in his mind becomes a sharp, insistent tug. 

In the opposite direction to the market, at the end of a row of tumbledown cottages, sits a hut already half-swallowed by the sands. It looks ordinary, no more and no less decrepit than any other dwelling here, but Kylo finds himself straying away from his destination and down towards it nonetheless.

The hut’s empty. He’d assume it had been empty for years if it weren’t for the hammock strung across the room when he peers inside and the faint lingering aura of human sweat. For what it’s worth, somebody lives here. And that somebody has left their presence drenched inside, splashed onto every surface like paint, saturating the air like sweet incense. It’s bright, a golden shimmer behind his eyes, and Kylo has only come across this kind of pervasive essence in one kind of person. A magic user has been living here.

Plutt really has been keeping secrets.

Reaching the market square suddenly becomes urgent. He turns Grimtaash and urges the horse in the direction the other Guard headed, barely formulating a plan in the moments it takes for him to arrive at the market. There is a magic user hiding in Niima—surely the other men feel it too? They must figure out who it is and…

Do their duty.

He feels the weight of the crowd’s dread turn towards him as he enters, and a fist of his own dread squeezes in his belly. He knows what he should do if he finds the magic user, and his momentary eagerness at discovering that luminous presence shrivels and dies. 

Instead, he throws himself back into the task he was came here to do. The woman—Maz Kanata—is surrounded by the Guard, clutched between Vicrul and Kuruk. She’s tiny in comparison, her dark skin as wizened as Snoke’s, though he thinks age is the only cause of her wrinkles. Her eyes are protected from the harsh sun by a pair of goggles, a small cap keeping her smooth head shaded.

And she is defiant.

It’s true he has no proof that she’s a member of the Resistance, but it’s written in every line on her face, in every measure of disdain for him in her body.

Kanata refuses to show him a morsel of fear. Instead, she pushes back at him as he tells her—and every other soul in the square—what she must already know. She has been judged already. She is doomed.

“Kill her,” he orders the Guard. He turns, ready to leave before he has to witness another spilled quart of blood.

The space blazes into light.

For a moment, it’s like staring at the sky as the sun emerges from the shroud of clouds: everything is eclipsed by how loud the magic is. It’s a beacon, pulling all attention its way, and Kylo is powerless to resist its call.

The source becomes obvious as a girl—a slight wraith draped in the colors of the desert—breaks free of the spell holding the crowd and dashes across the square to rescue Kanata.

She is magnificent.

He watches as she battles the Guard, easily besting them with the element of surprise, her subtle uses of magic to aid herself in the fight being so instinctive and impulsive that the men seem unable to anticipate what she will do next. Vicrul smacks head-first into the well and Kylo finds himself smiling beneath his mask. Ushar aims for her from horseback and she deflects the blow with ease, diving away from the melee. They aren’t fast enough to move, not with all their armor and weaponry, and she is going to escape—

She’s going to escape.

He has her in his grasp before he’s even made the decision, freezing her in place with a gesture of his hand. He blinks down at his hand, wondering when he chose, when he became so cruel that he couldn’t let her slip away to her freedom. Has Snoke really got so far under his skin?

But Kylo couldn’t let her go. Not for Snoke or his senseless decree against magic.

She glares at him, trying to mask her fear with the incandescence of her fury. In her stillness he’s able to get a real look at her—slight but strong, skin dusted with freckles, a fine bone structure, jaw tight with determination. 

No, Kylo couldn’t let her escape because of how radiant she is, of how brightly she’d called to him. Somewhere inside, a part of him had responded to that light—a part of himself that he no longer names, that he likes to pretend no longer exists—and couldn’t let her disappear into the crowd. 

Deep down, Kylo Ren is still the small boy who’d hidden behind his mother’s skirts. Only that boy had been spoiled and selfish. The state Jakku finds itself in can attest to that.

Yet that boy refuses to let Snoke have everything either. The Emperor may have his rules, but he didn’t set this one down as an order, and that gives Kylo room to flex his own will, for better or worse. And that means he’s not going to do what Snoke want him to do. That means this girl—this shining girl, brimming with potential—is going to live.

Kylo is going to keep her.


End file.
